There is a continually increasing number of terminals and mobile devices in use today, such as smart phones, PDAs with wireless communication capabilities, personal computers, self service kiosks and two-way pagers/communication devices. Software applications which run on these devices increase their utility. For example, a smart phone may include an application which retrieves the weather for a range of cities, or a PDA may include an application that allows a user to shop for groceries. These software applications take advantage of the connectivity to a network in order to provide timely and useful services to users. However, due to the restricted resources of some devices, and the complexity of delivering large amounts of data to the devices, developing and maintaining software applications tailored for a variety of devices remains a difficult and time-consuming task. These software applications can be used to facilitate the interaction with a variety of back-end data sources (such as Web services) and respective runtime environments of networked devices and terminals.
Currently, mobile communication devices are configured to communicate with Web Services through Internet-based Browsers and/or native applications, using modeling tools such as UML tools to assist in workflow expression in software application development. Undesirably, application developers need to have experience with programming languages such as Java and C++ to construct these hard-coded native applications. Further, there is an undesirable need to implement maintenance operations pertaining to compiled applications, including version, update, and platform type maintenance. There is a need for application development environments that can facilitate the interfacing of workflow expressed through modeling tools with the description of data source interfaces, such as Web Services Description Language (WSDL).
Systems and methods disclosed herein provide a component-based application development environment to obviate or mitigate at least some of the above presented disadvantages.